Sometimes it’s good to discriminate
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday that a Colorado web designer who did not want to design a website celebrating a same-sex marriage was within her constitutional First Amendment rights to refuse.
Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor called it a “sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people.”
She’s wrong.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said, "The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands."
Exactly.
But let’s take Sotomayor’s lament to heart. She presumably believes on the likely rare occasions where a same-sex couple are denied certain services due to others’ religious objections, that it will be “sad.”
I agree with Sotomayor. While I respect others’ religious beliefs and their right to them, same-sex marriage and other achievements for gay Americans has made our society and the country better. For people I know and love. For people I don’t know. I want nothing but the best for all my countrymen of any sexual orientation.
https://twitter.com/jackhunter74/status/1674929171435274241
I do not want what’s best for Nazis. If Nazis want a Jewish bakery to bake them a cake, I do not want to live in a country where Jewish Americans are forced by the government to bake that cake. Luckily we have a First Amendment that would prevent that, though it might be a “sad” day for Nazis.
Similarly, a black seamstress should not be forced to create Ku Klux Klan robes and masks. Lucky for her, as clarified this week by the Supreme Court, her moral objection and right to refuse such work is protected by the Constitution. “Sadly” enough for the KKK.
Could you imagine a gay-owned t-shirt business being forced to make shirts with homophobic bible verses? Perhaps worse, can you imagine an LGBT web designer being compelled by the government to help create a website that celebrated gay conversion therapy? (i.e. “pray the gay away!”) After all, religion is a protected class under civil rights law, so the same argument could be made.
Thankfully America’s free speech laws shield gay Americans from being forced to suffer such indignities.
A “sad” day for bigots, I guess.
A conservative Christian American is within their right to exercise the same judgment in what kind of business they participate in for what are ultimately moral, if different, reasons.
The US is a “rich and complex” country, where diversity is bound to cause friction. This is not new. In the 1950s and 60s the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow had created such an extreme separate experience for black Americans where they were denied basic services and accommodations throughout the South. Their suffering was widespread and practically inescapable. Congress and the president stepped in and through the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968. Whites who had previously disenfranchised black Americans were no longer allowed to do so as a matter of law.
This is not the gay experience in today’s US. That is not to say that LGBT Americans don’t face challenges—they do—but nothing comparable to the abuse of African Americans of decades ago.
But that is how the left will no doubt continue to paint this court decision. They should be ashamed of themselves for doing so.
Six judges on Friday read the First Amendment and decided that the best way to deal with America’s natural diversity and the friction it will always cause is to allow every man to conduct himself in accordance with his own conscience.
Not as the government demands.
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